The Party’s Over (Fin de fiesta, 2024) ‘TIFF’ Movie Review

Elena Manrique’s “The Party’s Over” opens with a migrant escaping under the cover of night. Bilal ( Edith Martínez Val), a nineteen-year-old Senegalese refugee, sneaks into a car that lands him at the sprawling house of a well-heeled Spanish woman, Carmina ( Sonia Barba, in rollicking good form).

Carmina is shocked at discovering him. He calms her down, pleading with her not to call the police officers, many of whom are right outside patrolling the streets. He tells her how he came from Senegal in a dinghy and his hopes of getting into France with his cousin. She lets him stay in a shed that she diligently locks up during the day while the housekeeper is up and about. She gives him clothes that belong to her son, who lives abroad. However, her many claims and assertions reveal themselves as not so reliable.

At the heart of the film is a playful, trenchant riff on the immigrant ordeal. The director pulls off a slew of mischievous slights on the unlikely circumstance when the migrant believes he/she has found a shelter of sorts, a beacon of help. To what degree can the beacon be trusted? Could duplicity be lurking in the shadows? The film is delicious, especially as it treads the line between a seeming benevolence and an undertow of pure unpleasantness.

Carmina’s overly projected niceness is what slowly sucks Bilal in. She makes him feel he can rely on her and that she truly means the best for him. But there are early traces of condescension. She is almost too determined in her insistence that she knows perfectly well what’s the wiser approach he must take.

The Party’s Over (Fin de fiesta, 2024) ‘TIFF’ Movie Review — A still from “The Party’s Over” (*Fin de fiesta*, 2024)

Carmina quickly begins dictating the course of Bilal’s trajectory. It’s a complete usurpation, a pretentious, posing kind-hearted hijack into the design of his intended journey to France. Why can’t he just stay in Spain with her? It’s a comfortable arrangement. Isn’t he aware of how pricey France is? Surely, horrors await him there when he could just set himself in her place.

She insists, promising she can help find him a job. He must reconsider all his plans of setting for France with his cousin. She effectively maroons him in her house, clearly defining the limits of where and when he can venture out of the shed. He is denied any right to go out. The screenplay shrewdly integrates Carmina’s peacock, which bobs mostly out of sight but serves as a canny, pre-empting thing for anyone entering or exiting her house without her notice.

Carmina cuts off Bilal’s access to the outside world, staving off his connection to his cousin. The list of things she proscribes him from increases. In due time, Bilal is also alarmed at the prison he has gotten himself into. The façade of politesse slips as Carmina reveals her nasty territorial instincts in wholly subsuming him under her firm, unflinching grip. She feeds him a diet of lies to keep him chained to her. The housekeeper, Lupe ( Beatriz Arjona), has a civil guard for a husband, so Bilal should ensure he never crosses her path. Carmina warns him that immediate danger will ensue. With this escalating dosage of caution, she isolates him wholly, holding him practically captive.

The film draws most of its lively energy from a sensationally arch, Sonia Barba, who aces the role of a woman with a great geniality and generosity that mask a more vicious, petty, dark edge. Barba clearly seems to be having a blast, unleashing a particularly delightful brand of meanness and entitled arrogance. “The Party’s Over” loses its focus when it spends too much time on the rich, bored, vacuous exploits of Carmina’s parties with her friends and family.

The skewering doesn’t land. The climax is unforgivably overstretched, careening into strained boredom and pure excess. Nevertheless, Manrique is a bitingly good filmmaker with a confident ability to maneuver twisting dynamics between two people, even if the pert group energy feels a tad jarringly misspent in “The Party’s Over.”